Florida Atlantic University Selects Bright Cluster Manager for HPC

Today Florida Atlantic University (FAU) announced that it is using Bright Cluster Manager software for its HPC cluster. The 56-node cluster is used for teaching Hadoop Map Reduce, bioinformatics research and other modeling and visualization work. Administrators say Bright Cluster Manager has significantly increased automation and is easily scalable to meet expected future growth.

The Boca Raton, Florida institution, a public, four-year university with five satellite campuses, provides high-performance computing (HPC) resources to researchers, students, and academics as part of the Sunshine State Education & Research Computing Alliance (SSERCA). Since the original 20-node HPC cluster went live, it has quickly grown to 56 nodes. The HPC cluster is expected to double in size every year as FAU pursues additional research areas, including medicine, big data analytics, physics, and astronomy. Other FAU academics are considering using the cluster for software development work.

“Bright Cluster Manager has been a great help,” says Eric Borenstein, HPC Administrator at FAU. “It makes things easy and has a simple learning curve compared with other alternatives.”

Automation is among the many benefits offered by Bright Cluster Manager. “It is a relief using Bright Cluster Manager to handle everything from large projects to more simple tasks like the DNS and HTTP,” said Borenstein. “I could do it all manually, but Bright made it a breeze. In addition, the implementation of Hadoop was really straightforward, especially having never worked with Hadoop before. It was great to just bring up new nodes or move them into another category. Once you figure out the workload, you can rebuild in two minutes.”

Since HPC was new to FAU, first-class troubleshooting support was essential, and according to Borenstein, Bright Computing delivered. “I would get good feedback, and even within the same day of reaching out, the team at Bright would send me a package to fix any issue,” he says.

With Bright Cluster Manager for HPC, FAU administrators can grow the cluster quickly and keep it running reliably throughout its life cycle – all with the ease and elegance of a fully featured, enterprise-grade cluster manager,” said Dr. Matthijs van Leeuwen, founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Bright Computing. “The latest version features enhanced workload management capabilities, and supports a rich collection of HPC software and a comprehensive suite of software packages for developers.”

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